Emberlands: Desktop Village

This is one of those games where the answer to, do I recommend this as an idle game is an easy yes, followed immediately by but. Overall rating: 4/5 I play a lot of idle games. Like, a slightly concerning amount. Over the past year alone I have played and 100%ed at least eight of them with a few unfortunate casualties abandoned along the way due to the dreaded time and resource inflation spiral. The good This game is really cute. Genuinely cute. The art is lovely, the colors are vibrant, and there is a surprising amount of visual variety. Everything feels polished and pleasant to look at while it quietly lives on your desktop. Mechanically, it works beautifully. The UI is clean, intuitive, and easy to navigate. I ran into zero technical issues, which already puts it ahead of a shocking number of games in the genre. The gameplay was clean. Watching the little Knack wander across the screen collecting resources while the village does its thing in the background was really satisfying. It feels alive without being distracting. The three loadouts are also a fantastic feature. Being able to test new builds without dismantling my best setup scratched that experimental…

Do not buy this game if you want to save your time and money. It’s extremely buggy, and it genuinely feels like no one is actively maintaining it. The tutorial is completely broken. You can’t read it or access it at all. I reported the issue to the developer and asked if there was a working tutorial somewhere because I actually wanted to play the game (it's so cutesy!). Their answer was for me to “experiment” and “discover” things on my own. When I asked if they planned to fix the tutorial, I never got a response. It really seems like they’re refusing to acknowledge the bug and instead insisting that the game is meant to be figured out blindly. LOL. If that’s the case, why have a tutorial in the first place? If you want a functional game or any kind of developer support, look elsewhere.

I wish I could give a neutral review, cause it's a visually very cute game. But my god, the grind to max all achievements is painful. With the game being fully hands off idle, there's basically nothing you can do to actually speed up any of the in-game processes. I don't mind fully idle games, but I generally expect them to be shorter experiences that are easier to complete and max achievements on. It's not fun waiting 50hrs for a totally idle game to be "finished". You're bottlenecked at every turn by extreme price jumps every time you upgrade your little guy or buy cubes to add more production plots. Right now it would cost me 1.5million wood to add 1 cube and it takes 2 cubes for the good plots, upgrading my guy's speed would cost 20billion ember. The only viable setups seems to be min-maxxing fields/autofields/farms and trolls/troll shamans, which leads to every farm being identical because none of the other objects produce nearly the same amount of ember even when fully maxxed. The little guy moves far too slow when it comes to gathering wood and the wood doesn't spawn in with enough frequency. That's with me having the little guy pretty upgraded. I wish the lottery wheel di…

I can fullheartedly recommend this game! I don't play that much idle games and most that I did play didn't succeed in convincing me to play them like an >idle game<. I always just played idle games 'actively' in a couple of longer sessions until I was either "finished" or burned out. This game is the first one that actually works for me like it's probably intended to work. A game that sits next to me, does it's thing, and every so often there is something to do. Like a desktop aquarium. And whenever I want to I can be a bit more involved, send my little knack (mine is called Goober) around or reshape and decorate my cute little village. The artstyle is so incredibly appealing. Every tile, building or piece of landscape feels like it's breathing and alive. I also really enjoy the pacing. It's not too slow but after having this game active for 30 hours it's also not like there is nothing more to unlock. I don't even have unlocked or seen a quarter of it's content from what I can see. Awesome game <3

No tutorial, no explanation, UI elements dissappear and don't return, so I can't even quit the games. I tried playing for an hour and simply couldn't because I don't understand the UI nor gameplay. I don't mind not enjoying a game, but spending an hour without even starting to play is not what I enjoy.

I love having my little knack wandering my desktop.